Norman O. Brown Quotes

98% of the atoms in your body were not there a year ago.

The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.

You're dealing with the body, and you're dealing with bodily functions. We romanticize everything about people in movies.

The actual atoms and molecules that make up my brain and body today are not the same ones that I was born with on September 8, 1954, a half-century ago this month.

The body IS a miracle, after all.

What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?

The human body is something that I truly love, above all else.

No knowledge can be more satisfactory to a man than that of his own frame, its parts, their functions and actions.

The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system which is never a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new.

The human body is mostly blood and mystery and sadness.

[This legendary Amazonian substance is] a cybernetic transdimentional medium of some sort that is generated out of the mysteries of the physiology of the human body.

The human body is amazing," she said. If you deprive it of one sensory input, the other senses take over, almost instantly.

How could I know a famished heart will eat its mind? Can kill its body?

Our body is a machine for living.

Like hunger or thirst, the instinct for balance is built into the human body.

The human body represents to me the same universal innocence, timelessness and purity of all seed pods, suggesting the mother as well as the child, the parental as well as the descendant, conceived according to nature's longings.

The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art.

We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hang on to the branches and abandon the trunk and body.

Standing under freezing cold showers every morning, - I did that. I got up to seven minutes most mornings, and it actually works; it immunizes your body, and your body starts getting used to the cold. It really works."

We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.

You can lose yourself in pleasure, 'til your body's going numb, but will it ever be enough.

Your body is malleable; you can sculpt it over time with daily habits of diet and exercise. The law of accommodation reminds us that the body may change slowly, but it will change.

There is nothing ugly in sexuality or in the body. It's human!

Any unchecked impulse does, within the human body and psyche, lead to the destruction of the organism.

It is the want that creates the body.